Governance as opportunity: Governance, risk, and compliance in the cloud

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One of my key themes is that of governance as enabler. As I proposed in my keynote on the transformation of business at the recent AICD conference, ‘Governance should focus as much on enabling innovation and taking useful risks as about managing and mitigating risk’. Over 93% of the 600 or so company directors present agreed with me. 

Today I’m at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, where I earlier gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure. Looking at governance from the perspective of information technologies is very instructive. Governance is a top priority for CIOs and IT departments, not least because there is so much that can go wrong in information management, notably from losing or exposing valuable data.

GRC is the acronym used by industry hands describe Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Compliance is becoming increasingly prominent – arguably even dominant – in technology, because government agencies are legislating on how consumer data should be protected, what information needs to be kept, the audit trails required, and even where physically data can be stored. The US SEC has sufficient expectations of companies’ data storage and retrieval capabilities to mandate hefty fines for every day taken to respond to requests for data.
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Steve Duplessie on information infrastructure and shifts in data storage

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Directly following my opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium was Steve Duplessie, who is recognized as one of the top people in the world on information infrastructure. 

Here are some notes taken from his excellent keynote:
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Keynote slides: The Future of Information Infrastructure

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This morning I am giving the opening keynote at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, organized by the Storage Network Industry Association and Computerworld.

Here are the slides to my keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure.

My usual warning applies: these slides are intended as visual support to my keynote, not as stand-alone slides. In this case they are even more than usually epigrammatic. However I share them for attendees and anyone else who might enjoy them. I will try to write more about some of my key points later.

Keynote: The Future of Information Infrastructure

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The evidence is in: we believe technology will create a better future but not better environment

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The Smithsonian Institute and Pew Research Center recently did a survey of Americans on what they thought would happen by the year 2050.

Good created a nice infographic, below, summarizing some of the data. Click on the image for the full size version.


Image source: Good

The Smithsonian magazine has also created a nice animation from the results.

Here are some of what the American people believe will (or is likely to) happen by 2050:
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Futurist conversation: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the role of a futurist

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Continuing our series of conversations with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency, and myself, here is the one we kicked off with: what is the role of a futurist?

Here are a few of the topics we discuss:
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How Arthur C. Clarke almost 50 years ago accurately predicted our world of global distributed work

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Arthur C. Clarke was certainly one of the most prescient people of the last century, anticipating many developments and in fact inventing the geo-stationary satellite on which much of the early media and communication revolution was based.

In this fantastic segment from a BBC broadcast in 1964 he confidently makes two predictions, one absolutely accurate, one completely wrong.

He says (from 1:45 to 3:13):
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Futurist conversation: Gerd Leonhard and Ross Dawson on the future of music

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Continuing our series of conversations on the future between Gerd Leonhard and myself, today’s session is on the future of music.

Here are a few of the points we made:
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How technological and social change are feeding on each other in an accelerating spiral

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In my recent keynotes I have frequently used variations on my Transformation of Business framework, which looks at how Technology Drivers and Social Drivers lead to a changed Business Landscape, and in turn New Drivers of Success.


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How large professional service firms are shifting to networked services and open innovation

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I recently ran a workshop on the future of business at the strategy offsite of one of the world’s largest professional services firm.

During the evening I had a very interesting conversation with one of the regional directors about how professional service firms are tapping external networks.

For over a decade I have written and spoken about the rise of networked professional services, looking at the trend for independent professionals to collaborate in order to compete with large firms. As I wrote in Chapter 9 of Living Networks:

Professional networks, although hardly a new phenomenon, are rapidly rising in importance. Their evolution is being driven by both the new ways of working enabled by connectivity, and the swift shift to professionals working as free agents. Corporate clients are increasingly happy to consider independent professionals as service providers, and in some cases actually prefer effective professional networks to expensive global firms with cookie-cutter approaches. The bottom-line is that for many types of business, professional networks are increasingly viable competitors to large, established firms. This is already apparent, but will become more obvious in coming years.

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Futurist conversation: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the future of money

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My friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard, who runs The Futures Agency (which I am part of), was recently in Sydney for a speaking engagement. We took the opportunity to record a series of conversations on the future. Here is our conversation on the future of money.

The key points we make are:
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